John Robbins of Baskin-Robbins Family Busts Dairy Industry Myths and More

Once heir apparent to the Baskin-Robbins family ice cream business and fortune, John Robbins was prompted by a few events he could not ignore to decline his inheritance and instead live with his wife in a single-room log cabin where he and his wife meditated for hours a day and gave birth to a son named Ocean.

He described these events last night in a telecourse called Living the Food Revolution, which I will attend each Wednesday over the next four weeks. Among these light bulb moments were the sudden cardiac arrest and death of his 54-year-old uncle, a partner in the ice cream corporation and a big eater of the frozen dessert, and his dad's acquisition of a severe case of type II diabetes. Robbins Senior swore up and down that these health problems were completely unrelated to ice cream. "He had to believe that," says Robbins Junior. "He had by that time sold and manufactured more ice cream than any human being on this planet. He didn't want to think that the product he was selling would hurt anybody, much less precipitate in any way the death of my uncle, his partner. But I had to think about it, and I decided that there was a connection."

Father and son John and Ocean Robbins join forces to lead the Living the Food Revolution course.

Decades later, in 1998, Robbins went on to write the best-selling book, Diet for a New America, (he's now penned several more) in which he details all the reasons that a plant-based diet is better for our health, better for the planet, and better for our relationship to the universe. Now he and his son Ocean are leading ongoing initiatives to educate Americans on how they can heal themselves and the world through their food choices. That may sound dramatic, but if you consider the environmental, human labor, and health costs of our current food system, it's not.

"We pay less per capita in this country on food than any nation in the world," said Robbins last night, "and more per capita on health care than any nation in the history of the world."

Later, he went on to explain why our doctors aren't routinely prescribing health-promoting plant-based diets as a form of medicine or preventive medicine.

"The average physician gets two and a half hours of nutrition course work during four years of medical school," he said. "We expect our physicians to be experts in human health. Actually, that's not the medical model. That's not what they're taught. That's not what they practice. That's not how they live. What medicine is about, actually, is about diagnosing and treating disease. We call it health care, but it would actually be more accurate to call it disease care. We have a disease care system."

The former ice cream empire heir also demythologized the common belief that milk product consumption is essential to human health. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the absorbability of calcium from leafy green vegetables was significantly higher than that of milk products. Brussels sprouts' calcium was 64 percent absorbable; mustard greens 58 percent; broccoli 53 percent; turnip greens 52 percent; kale, 50 percent. And cow's milk straggled behind at a mere 32 percent.

"It is widely not perceived as a myth that we need dairy products to get our calcium. Of course the dairy industry does a tremendous amount to promulgate that belief. There is no data to support it. It is ironic that they've gotten away with bamboozling people to the extent they have about it... Everyone's seen their ads - the milk mustache and everything. They put a tremendous amount of money to put them in everybody's face so often... [These] ads have always implied that [milk's calcium] is the best absorbed, the most bio-available. But it isn't."

The disconnect between dairy consumption and calcium absorption is backed by living human examples as well: as Robbins pointed out, the same nations that consume the most dairy - Finland, Sweden, the U.S., and England - also have the highest rates of osteoporosis.

"There is a certain blend of amino acids [in animal protein] that is acidic," Robbins explained. "And the body responds to that acidity by needing to neutralize, to buffer it so that the pH of blood and of other systems in the body can remain exactly where it needs to be.

"So to buffer it, you will remove calcium or magnesium from bone structure, because those are highly alkaline minerals, in order to use them to buffer and neutralize the acidity that dairy products bring. So what happens is these acid-forming proteins that come from animal products, including dairy, leach calcium out of the bones. And this is why there is a direct, incontrovertible connection between animal protein consumption and osteoporosis. Those people that consume less animal products have less osteoporosis."

I'll continue to update with more information from the Living the Food Revolution course over the next four weeks.